India’s New Age Queen of Kitsch

By Samantha de Bendern

Samantha de Bendern

Nida Mahmood at her studio in Shahpur Jat in South Delhi, April 10.

New Delhi-based fashion designer Nida Mahmood is a mixture of extremes: the old and the new, the frivolous and the profound; she finds inspiration in the chaos of Indian street life, but executes her shows with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.

She demonstrated this during last month’s Wills India Fashion Week in Delhi, which showcased her Fall-Winter 2013-14 collection. The central theme of her show was time travel, and featured a dress made of 100 touch screen tablets. For the piece to come alive she set up a complex Wi-Fi hotspot close to the catwalk. It was programmed to beam a continuous stream of images to the tablets at the precise moment the model appeared.

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The timing was crucial. Planning something down to the last second isn’t easy at an event that is notorious for its utterly unreliable timetable. Ms. Mahmood said she was a nervous wreck on the day, with only three seconds to spare when the models were getting ready. But she pulled it off without a glitch.

Time, and the way the past, present and future interact, is a central theme to much of Ms. Mahmood’s work. One example is her love of hand-painted Bollywood movie posters, which has led her to create pieces that are both steeped in Bollywood lore and thoroughly modern.

“The art of film poster painting went out years ago; they take too long to paint and today everything must be done fast and in large quantities… but I found so much beauty in those old posters that I wanted to find a way to recreate the emotions within them, fix them in time,” she said.

Ms. Mahmood tracked down the last surviving poster painters, now in their eighties, and persuaded them to train a team of 50 artists for her. Paint chips off easily, so she decided turn to 21st Century technology for help. The young artists now paint the posters by hand, then scan and reprint them before transferring them onto furniture, coasters, bags, textiles, notebooks, even vintage cinema chairs.

The mix of tradition and avant-garde comes across most strongly in her clothing collections. The shapes and lines are inspired by the current seasons in London or Paris, but the spirit of her work is thoroughly Indian. It exudes the frenzy of the Indian street.

She doesn’t like to think of her mini dresses and tight trousers as Western wear, rather she sees herself as an ambassador for Indian culture by interpreting designs that are accessible to an international market.

Samantha de Bendern

Ms. Mahmood’s company, New India Bioscope Co., is named after the film projectors in village fairs that would transport villagers to a magical world full of colors.

She wants to promote what she calls “New Age India” – a young, emerging country that is neither obsessed with imitating the West, nor slavishly faithful to traditional Indian concepts of fashion and elite dressing.

Ms. Mahmood’s company, New India Bioscope Co., is named after the film projectors in village fairs that would transport villagers to a magical world full of colors. “When you look through the Bioscope, the world you see is partly the projection of your dreams, and I wanted to create an image that was close to the colloquial Indian, his dreams, his sense of fun,” she says.

The result is a mix of psychedelic colors and kaleidoscope whirls. Her designs have earned her the title of Queen of Indian Kitsch, which she wears with pride. There are times when this has backfired however, as some critics are beginning to bemoan the wide use of kitsch in Indian fashion as an overly commercial marketing technique that has been done to death.

Whether commercial success was a goal or not, Ms. Mahmood, who in November was named one of the 50 most beautiful women in India by Femina Magazine, has certainly achieved it. She has secured promotional contracts from Absolute Nike, Blenders Pride and persuaded HCL to provide the logistical support for her latest show. She says making money isn’t her main motivation, but she does want enough to push the boundaries of technology and fashion.

In 2011, she wanted to create a dress out of LED lights, but most technicians she approached told her it was impossible. So she set about making it herself. The result was a dress made up of 2,000 light bulbs, which she showed at the Wills India Fashion Week Spring Summer 2012 show. Lady Gaga saw it, ordered it and wore it.

Samantha de Bendern is a former international civil servant turned banker, now a senior fellow at a London based think tank as well as a financial consultant.Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

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